New tricks elevate Alien: Romulus. But there’s an evil lurking inside of it.

A group of young friends, in seeing their bleak futures working in a mining colony until they die, seek escape. But when escape leads them to an abandoned research station, they discover something horrific.

It is safe to say that the Alien franchise was at an all time low in the lead up to the film’s release. Originator director Ridley Scott’s vision for the series fell apart with 2017’s misguided Alien: Covenant, which failed to deliver any tension, or relatability in its characters. Then Disney acquired 20th Century Fox, making the future of the franchise ambiguous. Scott had claimed plans for several more Alien sequels were in the works. No one was keen.
Director Fede Alvarez’s work on Alien: Romulus was originally planned as a digital release for streaming, but quickly gained traction for a theatre release. Any doubts as to its format or editing in this regard should be dropped: this feels like a theatre production.

The film, starring Cailee Spaeny (Civil War), has been produced under Ridley Scott’s production company, Scott Free. While Alvarez reportedly had James Cameron overseeing some of the early script concepts.

Alien: Romulus could well be 2024’s most anticipated movie. But does it hold up?

Mostly.

There is a lot to unpack, and there is potential for spoilers. It is recommended to go into this film blind; the internet will be rife with spoilers very, very quickly. A warning will be mentioned here, at least.

In terms of the tapestry of the Alien franchise, Romulus acquits itself respectfully for the most part. Director Alvarez’s claim to fame was writing, producing, and directing the 2013 remake of The Evil Dead. Your mileage may vary with that information. That film, while flawed, was an impressive spectacle in gore and violence.
This film is a direct sequel to its great grandfather Alien. With a near silent opening scene, the film shows “The Company”, Weyland Yutani, retrieving something from the debris field of the Nostromo. Then we follow the group of young adults, including Rain (Cailee Spaeny) and her brother, Andy (David Jonsson, Rye Lane) on a miserable Weyland Yutani-owned mining world. They have no means of escape as the company artificially keeps them there. But friends of theirs have a ship, and knowledge of an abandoned structure in orbit that houses cyro pods. A means of escape to a better life.
Unfortunately, that structure in orbit is an abandoned research station… and it certainly isn’t empty.

The film’s premise is a little hokey, and audiences may have to suspend disbelief for it to work. Is it as bad as a crew risking tens-of-thousands of lives to randomly go to an uncharted world? (cough, Covenant, cough) No. But it is still a bit strange. The film casually doesn’t elaborate on some finer details.

That said, the world building is nice. This feels like a part of the Alien franchise, somewhere between the first two films. It has the retro-future look. We are just seeing it from new perspectives. There is decent tension; the film builds up. It doesn’t rely on fake jump scares, either. When it shifts gears into horror in the second half, boy does it shift.

Once the genie is out of the bottle, it is hard to fully emulate the 1979 film’s majestic atmosphere. One imagines. But then, we don’t want a remake of Alien.

Overall, this film does unique things for the franchise. Some are excellent, others are… sick and unpleasant (which depending on your view of the franchise, could also be considered excellent). It pays a lot of lip service to the facehugger creature (pun intended) which is welcome as the skittering, spider-like creatures really are awful. The titular alien creature is used surprisingly sparingly. Although the acid blood is used with ruthless efficiency. The effects are gorgeous; with a lot of physical-looking effects.
The characters are okay. At least two of them get good chemistry and a taut dynamic running the entire length of the movie. Spaeny and Jonsson have a great story, and are the beating heart of the movie. The rest are pretty expendable.

[The rest is mild spoilers. I do mean mild. But I went into the film knowing nothing, and I feel I benefitted from that.]

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The drawbacks for the film, is the overindulgence of nostalgia and fan service. As stated, Alvarez remade The Evil Dead, and there is something of that mentality, unfortunately. We really don’t need lines from Alien and Aliens repeated here. That’s cute for a Ghostbusters sequel, but for Alien it comes off as cringe. It isn’t often, but there’s a really big one that was quite insufferable.
Also… here it comes: They use CGI to bring back a character. It is ghoulish, and while it can work (Ghostbusters: Afterlife, in a pinch) it was not needed or wanted here. The story did not require it; it could have been written differently and more effectively, with the bonus that we wouldn’t need to look at a weird face. It completely grinds the film to a stand still.

It is annoying to even write about it.
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But, the film is tense and it is creative. It was a hell of a lot better than the last two or even three mainline Alien films. It feels more harmonious with the first two films; a gentle expansion of what we know, without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Alien never was meant to be a franchise. This is still a haunted house movie, akin to the 1979 movie, but with influences of Cameron’s sequel. It acquits itself quite nicely. The production value is good, the world-building is good, the tension is at the very least there. It is fully gruesome and vile when it wants to be.

You can also find yourself nitpicking it severely.